Wednesday, December 8, 2010

The Missing Ink!

Get it, the 'missing ink'.

-ahem-

Welcome to another installment of my new and improved art blog. I'm your host Alonso Nunez. It's Wednesday and that means it's time to 'sketch' a nice bit of inking (hopefully a nice bit of inking anyways) over some pencils (usually by another artist but sometimes over my own).

This week's piece is the former. It's a piece by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, God Among Men. It was originally featured in Rough Cuts, a now-defunct magazine published by TwoMorrows which featured roughs, layouts, pencils, etc. by range of artists. It was basically a chance to see the process steps behind finished and published works. Contrary to much of his pencils, this Superman piece that I've chosen by JLGL is pretty tight. No fuss, no muss. The piece is straightforward enough, but I wanted to talk a second about where it came from for those of you who don't know.

Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez is less-known than he should be because he is so good. Bizarre sounding, I know. But let me explain. During the early 1980's DC Comics (who he's done the vast majority of his work for) had him spend most of his time not drawing comics, and instead drawing the various style guides and licensing pieces that DC would use for commercial clients and products. They basically had him be 'the face' of the company. These style guides are now themselves sought after and very collectible. His output, in terms of art pieces done, is fairly high; however, in terms of issues done JLGL has had an 'under the radar' career. Seriously check out some stuff if you're unfamiliar with the man!

This Superman piece comes from one of these style guides; I think it's from the '85 one. (They were divided by years) They were all originally inked by Dick Giordano, and I wanted to try to keep his clean, crisp inking style in my own version.